Deans' Weblog: Dalhousie Graduate Studies

INSIDE HIGHER ED: Advice for Graduate Students

On June 6 and June 8, Stephen C. Stearns, the Edward P. Bass Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale University, wrote two colums in Inside Higher Ed entitled "Advice for Grad Students" and "Advice for Grad Students -- II." The first column offered advice on non-writing issues such as being prepared for the worst, knowing why your work is important, managing your advisors, etc. (Advice for Grad Students). The second column focussed on writing issues for science graduate students (Advice for Grad Students -- II). Both pieces triggered a lot of comments worth reading.

When it comes to writing issues, my ultimate advice is that whatever you write should be good. Quality (content-wise, presentation-wise) is what matters. There are two many crappy papers appearing in the literature already.

That was easy. Enjoy the weekend.

 

Dieter

What graduate study is about

For most part, graduate school entails a critical transition for students from being a consumer of knowledge to becoming a producer of knowledge. Succeeding in graduate school entails learning new skills and enhancing self-discipline. So, how then is graduate school different from the undergraduate experience?

In its thesis-based programs, graduate school is not merely a series of classes. Depending on the program, students have to take classes during the first one or two years, but the later years will emphasize research (and students probably won't take any classes during those later years). The purpose of graduate school is to master an academic discipline through research, reading and independent study.

Graduate School is build on an Apprenticeship Model

Most of what students learn in graduate school will not come from classes, but from other activities, like doing research and attending conferences. Students work closely with a faculty member on his or her research. As an apprentice of sorts, they learn how to define research problems, design and carry out research projects to test their hypotheses, and disseminate their results. The end goal is to become an independent scholar able to design and execute his/her own research program.

Graduate School is a Job

A pragmatic way to approach graduate school is to treat it as a full-time, underpaid job. It's not "school" in the undergraduate sense. If students soared through their undergraduate years with little studying, they're in for a big culture shock. The reading lists will be longer and more extensive than they've ever encountered during undergraduate studies. More importantly, graduate students are expected to read and be prepared to critically evaluate and discuss it all. Most graduate programs require that students take initative for their learning and demonstrate commitment to their career. Always remember that no one will hold a graduate student’s hand and walk him or her through. Graduate students must provide their own motivation.

The comparison of graduate school to a long hour, intellectually demanding and not overly well-paid job, was in large part inspired by Jorge Cham's comics. His comics can be found at "Piled Higher & Deeper." Reading them is my preferred way to procrastinate.

Have a great weekend.

 

Dieter

Plagiarism - Four Specific Ideas

Many years ago I had students prepare a series of briefings for a company of their choice on emerging trends that might affect the e-commerce prospects of that company.  One student came across an article (from either Wired or Fast Company Magazine, if memory serves) describing the use of the municipal water distribution system as a conduit for cheap extremely high speed bandwidth data delivery into the home. Among the many benefits of this emerging technology was the fact that almost everybody already has access to high water flow rates where they are connected to municipal systems. The article was written in a very compelling way.

The article referred to the website of the company developing the technology, and sure enough, such a website with drop down menus etc. existed. The student recommended to the CEO of her lens company that he instruct the Chief Technology Officer monitor the evolution of this promising new development.

The student missed one important fact about the article; the date of publication was April 1.  So much for critical thinking.

The date of today’s blog created a very serious temptation. For example, I thought it was really interesting that one of the promises coming out of the Canadian federal election was 25% university tuition relief for retirees between 60 and 65 years old, and 50% for students over the age of 65. This applies only to credit course programs, and not to courses related to the University of the Third Age or programs like that. The idea is to connect the serious growth of the “retired” demographic with the need to grow the post-secondary sector. Old bums in new seats, so to speak.

 

All very interesting and tempting, but not what is top of mind for me this week.  Another case of academic integrity has landed on my desk. Obviously the specifics are not appropriate for such a public forum, but I confess to being quite puzzled. Avoiding plagiarism is not that hard to do. It requires a small number of disciplined behaviours scrupulously observed.

• Yes, there is the old project management proverb – if it weren’t for the last minute, nothing would get done.  But leaving any major piece of writing to the last minute creates a temptation to cut a corner, or an opportunity to make a mistake. A more complete examination of the procrastination syndrome in the academic setting warrants a separate blog, or perhaps a number of them. In the meantime, do yourself a favour, and follow the old Catholic recommendation “avoid the occasions of sin.” Wise people with major writing projects will start earlier than they think they really need to, whatever they are going to write.

• When I do lit reviews (most of it digitally mediated of course), I separate my reading from my thinking and writing in a Word document using two columns. In the first column, I copy and paste stuff I’ve read that seems important / useful / relevant / interesting, making sure every single one of these extracts has an open quotation mark and a close quotation mark.  This is also the place to use your digital citation manager (e.g., Endnote, Refworks). Wise people will take care to note the page number of the source too. In the second column, I write what I have to say about the selection. In other words, there is a physical separation between my ideas, and the ideas of others, and there is a punctuation separation too. If you want, you can use the highlighting function in Word to colour code the quotations to add another layer of separation between what is yours and what belongs to someone else.

• A word about citation management software. If you are in a research-intensive field and under the age of 50 years old, it’s simple. You MUST get access to this software. Wise people will climb the learning curve far enough to make it productive and then build on that competency. At Dalhousie University there is no excuse for students (or faculty) since this tool is available at no cost. It connects automatically with scholar.google.com and most other scholarly sources. It will help you identify the necessary data elements to properly cite a web page, or a youtube video as far as that goes. It will format the references in the document and in the References section according to the requirements established in your discipline or for the journal you are writing for more consistently than 95% of writers.

• If you are a graduate student, you have an obligation to find out how to deal with citation expectations including complications such as citing someone who is citing someone else, sources without authors, personal communications, lecture notes, lectures / speeches, audio podcast, video podcast, etc. Wise people find out about the exceptions that are most common in their discipline. Wise people always go back to the source to make sure it has been cited correctly. (I once came across a quote attributed to me from an article published in a very reputable journal that simply was not in the article cited, and was something I am quite sure I never wrote, said, dreamed, or thought.)

I appreciate that cultural norms around intellectual property are in flux. I understand that some cultures value regurgitating and replicating the knowledge the elders have already produced, that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. It’s just that mashing together a whole lot of written material produced by other people (however good that writing might be) fails on one very important dimension. It does not produce new people capable of new thinking and communicating effectively for themselves.

That’s too high a price to pay for tolerating plagiarism, when simple personal discipline virutally eliminates it.

 

 

Sunny

 

 

The 10 Year PhD Limit - Is it Long Enough?

Most graduate schools calendars are going to have something explicit to say about how long students have to finish their programs, especially the PhDs. the Dalhousie Calendar says that the PhD / JSD is a 6 year program for full-time students only (i.e., not part-time).

Let's talk about the full-time / part-time question first. For students doing bench science and who are "fully" funded, there is a relatively easy way to confirm this. But for just about everyone else, this is one of those "rules" that is more honored in the breach than in the observance. How would any  one monitor it? What do we expect of students with families and limited funding?

So let's set aside the full-time /part-time issue. Our calendar goes on to specify the general policy around leaves of absence, and extensions beyond the expected period.  But as you read down the page there emerges an ominous tone- "Under no circumstances can a student be registered in a program for more than 10 years."

I've had some extensive discussion with a couple of parties on this exact topic, and my valued colleague Hal asked the question.  Why do we have a 10 year rule?

Good question, Hal. And since I wasn't around when the rule was created, I didn't have the complete argument ready to hand apart from the obvious ones. So I did what any sensible academic would do. No, not Wikipedia. I went to scholar.google.com.

There is no shortage of discussion about how to shorten time-to-completion, but very little on why this is desirable. So I combed through a lot of material and put the following together.+

Permitting long times-to-completion increases the likelihood of not completing. It undermines the focus necessary for a successful outcome. There is an old rule in project management “If it weren’t for the last minute, nothing would get done.”  My suspicion – if our program officer hadn’t alerted the student she was past the deadline, we would have been talking about this 2, 3, 4, 7 years from now, wherever the deadline was set.

The longer the period of time from initiation of studies to dissertation production produces a risk that what was learned for the comprehensives is no longer a sound basis for the research.  There are very few fields of studies which would be willing to assert they aren’t making material progress over a decade.

A policy of permitting exceptions beyond 6 years encourages poor supervision. I submit this is exactly what has happened in this case, even taking into account the death of the student's supervisor.  

The longer period of time from initiation of studies to dissertation production sometimes creates a situation where there is ongoing funding in the face of inadequate progress, funding that could have been used for more productive, more focussed students. Long times-to-completion also dilutes the supervisory help available to other students. I haven’t had the time to ask staff to determine what the total level of support for the student applying for the exemption has been over the decade; I’m afraid of what the answer might be, and the implications.

Well, what does it matter if we let this one student complete? It’s not going to be the end of Western civilization as we know it, is it?  Of course not.  But it undermines the policy and creates a situation where it is difficult to apply the rule at all.  Permit an anecdote that speaks to my concern around long time-to-completions and the effect on quality. There was a beer company in the US that had some smart management consultants in to make a recommendation about how to improve profits. They ran an experiment between two beers, the first created using the current ingredients, and the second using very slightly inferior ingredients.  Knowledgeable beer drinkers simply could not tell the difference. So management went with the ever-so-slightly inferior inputs that, of course, cost less.

You can guess the rest of the story.  Four incremental experiments of this kind produced exactly the same result.  There is always an increment of lower quality that is difficult to detect.  But by the time they got to the fourth, there was a very discernible difference between the original beer, and the last iteration. It was enough to seriously change the demand for the beer, undermining the brand as a whole. So we let one through, and the other two cases on my desk have a case for appeal (consuming yet more resources better allocated elsewhere).  So I let 3 students through.  Now we enter into a debate about whether any deadline (15 years?  20 years?) is necessary. There is one thing for certain.  Whatever deadline you choose to set, someone is going to ask for an extension.

Other arguments for why time-to-completion is an issue.

• Delayed graduation affects career progression for many students.
• Encourages letting “the perfect” stand in the way of “the good”, and even “the acceptable” when "acceptable" of course by definition is acceptable.
  
• Long program timetables makes it possible for faculty to exploit students in their effort to generate research outcomes for their own labs.
• “Low completion rates deter prospective graduate students, thus creating long-term staffing and academic consequences, and long times-to-completion reduce the time graduates may potentially spend in gainful employment, which is particularly hurtful in an era of crippling student debt loads.”  (PhD Degree Completion in Canadian Unviersities by Frank Elgar of Dalhousie University. There is another related report from CAGS available.)
• Time-to-completion figures are a measure (whether you like it or not) that governments and most universities themselves use as one proxy for university effectiveness.  By permitting extensions like this, there is a reputational risk for the department, the faculty and for the university.  In the UK time-to-completion data is used for funding purposes  -- that’s how important this issue is to the people responsible for public policy and funding for universities. NIH thinks it’s important. The UK and German national governments think it’s important.
• Such delays in completion are often a sign of problems in supervision.  I’m not able to comment specifically in this case, since there is not much in the way of annual progress reports for this student.
• Extending time-to-completion generally produces much higher debt for the student.
• Overall higher time-to-completion rates reduce the throughput for the development of HQP.

So that is how the debate went.

I did learn one lesson in all of this. We at Grad Studies are going to take a much more proactive approach to this. We are going to find the students who are at year 5, and ring the bell. We don't care whether the students perceive the bell as the signal for the last lap, or the warning bell. We just want them and their supervisors paying attention to the time-to-completion issue much sooner than 10 years.

Sunny

twitter:  @sunnyatdal

The Doctoral Motel

No not a misspelling, I mean motel! Dieter sent me a recent book review by Thomas H.Benton from the March 19, 2010 Chronicle of Higher Education titled "A Very Special Marketplace." (article) in which Benton reviewed a recent book by Louis Menand **. I am not sure that I have ever done a review of a book review but this was an intriguing one. I took the blog title from Menand's notion of graduate school as a motel in which students "check in but do not check out."

Reading the review brought me back to Dieter's blog a couple of weeks ago on PhDs in the Humanities. For me the perplexing part of this ongoing discussion is related to three issues; time to completion, completion rate, and job prospects. So how long does it take to get the degree, how many students simply give up along the way, and what kinds of jobs are they able to get. These are important issues, especially when one reflects on the personal and financial cost of a PhD!

Time to completion. The length of PhD programs have been changing but not uniformly. In the Sciences we find expectations are increasingly for shorter time to completion rates, moving towards 5 years while in the Humanities we find consistently longer times to completion, hovering on 8 years.  Why is that? Is a PhD in humanities worth more? Is it harder? Or does it take longer to meet the goal. It is interesting that there has been a shift in the thesis model in many science disciplines to allow manuscript theses, which are centered on 3 journal papers (often already published) while in the humanities  the thesis remains modeled as a book. Is there a thesis model or expectation that would allow shorter times to completion? What is a reasonable expectation of years of one's life to earn a PhD?? An often overlooked social impact is the effect of long PhD programs on the people. Menard writes "lives are warped because of the length and uncertainty of the doctoral education process."  Possible a bit over the top but certainly long times to completion reduce lifetime earning, pension contributions, and family collegiality.

Completion Rate. There is ample data to affirm that PhD candidates in the sciences are more likely to finish the degree than in the arts and humanities. All sorts of reasons, of course, but funding and expected time to completion play a big role. Simply put, funded students can spend more of their time on their thesis work. And more simply put, there is more scholarship and grant money available in the sciences. Not fair perhaps but apparently true.  To change this two things, at least, will need to change. First, professors will need to step up to funding students whose work may not benefit them in the way that student work does in science. Second, society and governments need to recognize with their wallets that arts and humanities are core not frills.

Job prospects: Not the best time in history to be looking for an academic job, for sure, but do we have blinders on when we look at the training/experience afforded by PhD programs. Let me go back to the review and quote Menard again who decries "devoting resources to training them in programs half will never complete and for jobs most will not get." Ouch! As my business oriented friends would remind me, what is the cost benefit ratio here. How much preparation for how much benefit, personal and economic. To put this another way, how does the apprenticeship experience of the PhD process in different disciplines relate to getting a job that requires the use of those skills. Can it be that sometimes we "overtrain" in academic terms and "undertrain" in professional terms, by which I mean  apprenticeship experiences that would enhance the prospects of getting hired for not just academic jobs but a whole range of other jobs that need those PhD level analytical skills!

I think we need to step up to a review of the PhD as we know it. What do we really expect the outcomes to be? What do we reasonably think people with such degrees will do to contribute meaningful to our society? How much is it worth in terms of time and sacrifice?

I don't know! but I cannot help but think we are slightly off track here.

Carolyn

**Louis Menand, 2010, "The Marketplace of Ideas:Reform and Resistance in the American University". Norton Press.

Fast Forward with the Thesis

OK we all know what a thesis is. Well at least we recognize one when we see it.  The “standard” for theses varies dramatically across disciplines. For instance, a thesis in the arts/social sciences/humanities may be a monograph in waiting; a thesis in a science has a recognizable sequence of research question-methodology-results-discussion. But what about the arts like dance and film? There we find more of the visual portfolio format with relatively little textual exposition.  But overall we accept these variations as theses. But I suspect that the theses prepared today would raise the eyebrow of a scholar of just 100 years ago!  Theses, like most things, evolve. For example, we now accept a thesis that is not one tome but a collection of papers with multiple authors; a thesis that is entirely electronic; a thesis with auxiliary files; a thesis with coloured slides, animations, etc. No problem. The core is that the work is original, increases our knowledge, is complete, and has been examined.

    If I play the tape forward 50 years (even 20 years) will we still use a thesis as the benchmark of academic preparation? If we do, how will we then define a thesis (i.e., thesis 5.0). Assuming a "thesis" remains part of the academic requirement, let’s start with what is mostly obvious; the thesis will not be printed; the thesis will still contain original work of author(s); the thesis work will be reviewed. That leaves a lot of scope for change! Let me address just a few.

    Authorship. Increasingly we encourage and are encouraged to work in collaborations with many fields relying almost entirely on joint publications. Why then do we insist on the individual thesis? How long can that expectation be met. How can we evaluate the preparation of the individual in increasingly joint work? Whatever the answer to those questions, single author theses in many fields are likely to go the way of the dodo. This brings up the evolving notion of authorship, but that is the topic of another blog!

    Completeness. Once we made the move from strictly paper into digital theses we began the exploration of possibilities that come from including all of the data used in the work, animations, exploratory visualizations of results, films, dialogs, 3-D images, music, etc. A thesis in the future may not be considered complete without the original data!

    Review.  I suggest that examination and review of the body of work will continue. But perhaps the comments about a given dissertation, critical reflections by knowledgeable people, will be included as annotations for future readers to think about and to use when building on this work. To take that further, there can be a chain of annotations over longer periods as the thesis is read and reread. Sort of thesis as blog! The author(s), of course, could provide rebuttals to any future comments.

Interaction. Given my point above about completeness, a future thesis would allow interaction with the data used for and presented in the thesis and the results of that interaction should be available to future “readers” of the thesis. That is, a thesis would stop being a report on a discovery or discourse at a point in time and become a starting point in discovery. Maybe by the time we get to thesis 5.0 we become users rather than readers of theses!

    Connectivity. My personal guess is that theses be explicitly networked not only to earlier theses and research but with those applications and future theses derived from them. That is, the record shows the impact of a thesis over time, rather than marking them as cairns to some point in time.

As with all crystal ball gazing I am likely to be way off the mark! But I am willing to bet that a thesis in even 20 years will be a far cry from what we consider today to be the gold standard. Meanwhile we need to be pretty clear about what the goals of creating and defending a thesis are. I leave that for another day!

Happy new year

Carolyn